How to Build a Library

This is a book about books, about the power of reading, and about the strange nature of books as objects. While the predicted decline in book publishing and book buying hasn''t happened, the question of why we should read books at all is still a pressing one. Yet who can imagine a life without reading? Ever since he was a boy, Ian Patterson knew he wanted to have a library. This book sets out to trace the changing enthusiasms and shifting fortunes through which his library grew (and sometimes diminished); and by thinking back over the part books have played in his life, to make a case for the importance of books, reading and the crucial potential of literature - fiction, poetry, essays - in our lives if we know how to approach it. HOW TO BUILD A LIBRARY is about the rich pleasures and powers of reading and imagination, an account of some of the books that have meant most to Ian during his life, and a primer in how to make the most of what we read.

Préface
A guide to expanding your reading horizons by the much-loved writer, critic, poet and translator who has read it all

Auteur
Ian Patterson is a widely published poet and translator, and a former academic. The author of Guernica and Total War and Nemo's Almanac, he won the Forward Prize for Best Poem in 2017, with an elegy for his late wife, Jenny Diski. He worked in Further Education between 1970 and 1984, had a second-hand bookselling business for ten years after that, and from 1995 until 2018 was an academic, teaching English Literature at the University of Cambridge. Many of his students have gone on to shape the world of publishing and writing, both in the UK and the US, including Zadie Smith, Helen Macdonald and Emily Witt.